Dissidents, fascists, and turncoats, oh my: Cannes wraps with La Bola Negra and tide of political cinema

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With only a day left, the organizers of the Cannes Film Festival have avoided the messy fates that recently befell their counterparts in Berlin and Toronto: The fest has not imploded over political debates waged during press conferences, postscreening speeches and red-carpet incidents.

Yet many of the films premiering on the Croisette – including some of the strongest titles playing in the official competition – succeed precisely because they touch an explicit political nerve. If, as Cannes jury president Park Chan-wook declared at the start of the festival, art and politics should not be divided, then the filmmakers he was set to judge have already embraced his philosophy with vigour and gusto.

While this year’s programming slate was heavy on art-house veterans exploring overly familiar themes to diminishing effect – Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas is a drippy meta-commentary on the Spaniard’s own creative aimlessness, while Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda went back to the parent/child melodrama well with his sci-fi dramedy Sheep in the Box – there were a handful of festival favourites who leapfrogged over their previous work, each using specific geopolitical themes to sharpen their storytelling.

In Cannes, one moviegoer’s trash is another’s treasure

Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, the most effective and devastating film of the festival, finds the Romanian filmmaker, like his fellow Cannes favourites, ostensibly in well-trod territory. Like the director’s dramas Graduation, R.M.N., and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (the latter of which won Cannes’ Palme d’Or in 2007), Fjord is a thorny look at societal taboos and the splintering of the family unit. But the director takes a more dizzying and stomach-twisting approach than even his most loyal admirers are used to.

Set in a remote Norwegian town, the film follows a conservative Romanian-Norwegian family (led by an unrecognizable Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve) whose child-rearing tactics come under fire from the state’s child-welfare authorities.

After an allegation of abuse is made against the parents, Mungui plunges the audience into a brutally effective test of political prejudice. Are we meant to side with the ultra-left-leaning, perhaps “woke,” Norwegian state, which seems to push progressiveness with an almost religious fervour? Or should we side with the “traditional” values of the family, whose legal fight begins to attract unsavoury figures in Romania’s far-right movement?

As Mungiu toys with the political presumptions and allegiances of his audience – which, at a festival like Cannes, are overwhelmingly liberal – Fjord twists itself into a legal thriller that is at once satisfying and maddening in its knottiness. Whatever your thoughts on the film’s finale, no one will argue that Tourism Norway will very much hate it.

A more of-the-moment political conflict is laced throughout Minotaur, the latest film from the dissident Russian filmmaker Andrei Zvyagintsev (Leviathan, Loveless).

In Cannes, a new cultural world order emerges

Living in exile from his country after Moscow’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Zvyagintsev delivers another one of his slow-boil dramas that doubles as an unmistakable commentary on Putin-era corruption. A loose adaptation of Claude Chabrol’s 1969 drama The Unfaithful Wife – but just as easily viewed as an update of Adrian Lyne’s 2002 lurid erotic drama Unfaithful – Minotaur follows a corporate executive (Anatoliy Beliy) who discovers that his wife (Iris Lebedeva) is having a torrid affair with a younger man.

Violence follows, but the thrust of Zvyagintsev’s beautifully shot thriller is that, in modern Russia, any terror can be justified so long as it comes from a position of unbending force. It is easier to admire the film’s ideas, and its director’s courage in castigating his home country, more than the narrative and thematic mechanics of the film. Especially given that Zvyagintsev has the tendency here, more than his previous work, to employ a “don’t-you-see?” approach when it comes to contextualizing the family drama against the political realities of the moment.

Yet with its dark-hearted artistry and zeitgeist-y charge, not to mention two perfectly calibrated central performances, it could easily take home this year’s Palme d’Or, and all its relatively minor faults would be forgiven.

Far from dark, but just as concerned with the political realities of capitalism and its effect on our bodies, is All of a Sudden, the latest epic-length drama from Japan’s Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car). On the surface a story about the friendship that develops between a Parisian nursing-home manager (Virginie Efira) and a terminally ill woman who comes into her orbit (Tao Okamoto), the 196-minute drama frequently digresses – in a poetic, profound manner – into discussions about the economic and political boxes that we unwittingly put ourselves into over our lifetimes.

The film might be too winding and digressive for some, or perhaps most, audiences. But allowing Hamaguchi to capture the Palme would be as politically relevant a statement as anything else.

Meanwhile, if politics is, in one way or another, a form of resistance, then a handful of other hard-hitting Cannes titles have that discourse locked down.

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Spain’s historical epic La Bola Negra (The Black Ball) from Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi arrived late in the festival, premiering on the second-last day, and immediately sparked talk of a Palme d’Or win. A century-spanning look at queer sexuality and violence told through the prism of a long-lost Federico García Lorca play, the film is as much a sweeping drama as it is a treatise on Spanish political oppression, and those who stood against it.

While the film’s overlapping storylines get burdensome to handle and the narrative momentum can stall, there is a certain kind of play-to-the-rafters ambition here, all underscored by an intense political mindset, that pushes you over into more-than-grudging admiration.

Emmanuel Marre’s idiosyncratically engineered A Man of His Time also takes its sweet time in telling the story of a Vichy France stooge (played with intense inscrutability by Anatomy of a Fall star Swann Arlaud), but its message about the dangers of ignorance is heard loud and clear. It also gets bonus points for telling a Second World War-era story using ’80s synth pop and a memorable snippet from Gershon Kingsley’s 1969 single Popcorn.

On the subject of fascism and the lingering stench that it leaves behind, Paweł Pawlikowski’s engaging drama Fatherland offers a crash course in the divisions, literal and allegorical, that tore postwar Germany. Although the biographical drama following a road trip with author Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter/handler Erika Mann (Sandra Hüller) might have its brisk runtime of 82 minutes be mistaken for thematic brevity.

Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson crime drama Paper Tiger roars Cannes wide awake

Even the festival’s sloppiest, most confounding selection flicked at political mind fields. Na Hong-jin’s sci-fi spectacle Hope is half an action masterpiece, half a mythology-dense mess. But its story focusing on a South Korean village near the DMZ fending off monstrous hordes gets its one and only thematic jolt from the quick appearance of a government-sponsored billboard dotting the landscape: “Protect the Nation from Infiltration.”

Is Pyongyang the big threat, or something even more alien? That will have to be something for Park and his jury to decide.

Barry Hertz’s Cannes Top 10

10. La Bola Negra

9. Hope

8. A Man of His Time

7. Fatherland

6. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

5. Minotaur

4. Paper Tiger

3. The Man I Love

2. All of a Sudden (Soudain)

1. Fjord